Hippies
Yeah, they were white people appropriating just about every culture they could get their hands on - and yeah, they were annoyingly doped up and stupidly optimistic about 'peace man', but it would take a really soulless bastard to laugh at a group of them dying.
Cue Jon.
Hippies weren't the most politically correct group in the world, neither were they always the most helpful. Though I suppose at it's core we can hold onto the fact that humanity saw an era of people that just didn't care about the government or the rules - even if it was just a fad.
Jon is a man who admits to laughing at the scene in Watchmen when a group of hippies are shot literally point blanc. Especially a young girl who doesn't look more than 16 years of age.
So Jon can handle and even laugh at the horrific violence against a sub-culture his ridiculously right tendencies caused him to hate, but a decapitated demon head is a step too far?
To use a phrase coined by my friend Ali over the years... PRIORITIES JON, GET SOME!
For Jon to babble on about how he enjoyed Mortal Kombat and drew inspiration from it, only to then counteract with how he cut the violence from his own work is a slight misinterpretation of facts. Jon didn't cut the gore from his book altogether; his writing skills are just that horrible that the gore and violence becomes as bland as everything else.
Jon's fight scenes are a mess of switching viewpoints and sub-par descriptions that leave the reader wondering whether anything interesting is actually going on.
Let's just say he's no J.R.R Tolkien when it comes to battle scenes.
The idea that Jon would purposefully cut any violence or gore from his book is literally an insult to his own genre. Harry Potter was for kids and though it wasn't gory, it took death seriously and it took the kids reading it seriously. Lord of the Rings was plenty violent and just about any popular young adult book will handle violence at some stage. Why? Because violence and conflict is a natural stage in the progression of plot and depth. We see characters grow in battle; their personalities and morals are tested in the most extreme situations.
Jon's characters simply seem to fall flat; revealing either horrendous character faults, like Jasper's ever prominent list of priorities (THA BULLIES GUYZ, I'M SO ANGRY) or Morgalla's complete and utter lack of a relationship with her so called mentor. Not only this, but Jon's chosen creatures are naturally violent and gory. Jon's story would benefit from being more gory because it would stay true to legend. We have this un-realistic bad guy that just does nothing the whole way through. We're told he's a really bad guy but never see anything that makes him stand apart from anyone else. If he say, killed an army of humans mercilessly and had there corpses prepared in a mighty demon feast, maybe then I'd believe he was half as bas ass as Jon made him out to be.
Jon is a kid who has watched one too many simplistic cartoons about good vs evil. I love the emphasis Jon always puts on having a simplistic plot without ever realising that even simplistic plots will have complicated characters and events to make them interesting. The Lord of the Rings was essentially good vs evil, but we at least saw the different alliances, had more than one epic battle and got a story that despite having a plot that could be boiled down to the age old tradition of good guys fighting bad guys, actually kept our attention.
Jon's drive for simplicity is his un-doing. We see one epic battle that isn't even that epic. The characters are dull and un-involved to the point where I don't care if they live or die. The ending is a let down with a villain that doesn't even appear. Okay, Sauron doesn't make a massive appearance in The Lord of the Rings either, but at least the people fighting in those books knew what they were fighting against and the severity of the situation. Jon just has random, not-very-strong creatures come piling out of the ground and then suddenly the towns peoples get all patriotic. It's like stars and stripes should be playing in the background. Too bad Jon can't write motivational speeches either. I think if someone tried to rally me at a battle with one of Jon's speeches, I'd be skipping off to safety in seconds.
Jon tried to do a Morpheus and failed.
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